For Angelika Fitz, the most important project in Austria this summer has been an already demolished gabled roof house over a housed-in city highway. In her article she explains why this building had to remain a painful phantom in the urban fabric of Linz.

Temporary interventions have risen from aesthetic oddities to a popular urban strategy. Especially in urban renewal projects, vacant properties and undeveloped sites are upgraded that way. Residents are invited to contribute their ideas, and festivals are being staged to allure tourists. Without doubt, the prospect of maximum media publicity combined with comparably small financial commitment will be a temptation for many more investors and local authorities. For some, the practice of a differential production of space that Henri Lefebvre had called for as early as in the 1960s may thus at long last have entered the mainstream while others see in this tendency only the stabilisation of a dispositif that thanks to its ephemeral nature and processuality does all too well comply with the requirements of neoliberalism and its exploitation logics. In view of this contradiction, finding and understanding projects that successfully have found and made productive the unstable balance between symbolic capital and popularisation, between participation and piece of service, between entertainment and learning effects.

The architects Peter Fattinger, Veronika Orso and Michael Rieper use to act as a loose collective in the field of the ephemeral. They do, however, not act as an urban crisis intervention team but rather prefer to engage in locations that are classified as already rehabilitated and renovated. Their interventions successfully achieve to create public space – a goal costly restructuring measures had failed to realize before. The most recent example of their interventions has been “Bellevue. Das Gelbe Haus”, a project in the context of the 2009 European Capital of Culture events in Linz. The project was located in a landscape park on the housing of the Linz city highway. Although this park had been desired for years by the noise-ridden residents it has only sparsely been used since its opening. Erected at the edge of the highway, the “Gelbes Haus” on the one hand brought back the view of the cars and addressed the green monotony of the park on the other. Thanks to its gabled roof – an element familiar from the rural typologies of the neighbouring residential buildings of the Nazi-Era – and thanks to the flower-bedecked observation terrace, the “Bellevue” has been popular from the start while also being foreign enough to introduce new motion in the neighbourhood’s everyday life. Apart from its iconic function, the building offered a thrilling spatial structure for many groups of users including niches for the young, accommodation for artists, a cafeteria the cooks of which changed once in a week, artists’ workshops and showrooms as well as a stage on which cost-free performances were shown every day. Here, the appropriation frequently invoked within the context of such projects nearly bordered on absorption.

The “Gelbes Haus” must remain, many residents demanded at the end of the summer misjudging the impact of the state of exception that is just created by the ephemeral character of such projects – a state that brings with it the possibility of overcoming judicial barriers to build on a trouble spot, a willingness on the part of the commissioners and visitors to get involved with something unaccustomed, and an intensity that can solely arise from an effort of limited duration. Temporary interventions are effective not despite but because of their ephemeral nature. That is why the “Gelbes Haus” will stay in the neighbourhood as a phantom.

Fakten
Architekten Fattinger, Orso, Rieper, Wien

---

aus Bauwelt 43.2010
Artikel als pdf